Endowed chairs give UMass researchers flexibility

Sunday

Jun 30, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Aaron Nicodemus

When Eileen L. Berman died of appendiceal cancer in April, her husband of 57 years, Stanley, and her family had long ago decided that they wanted to help researchers focus on finding more effective early detection and prevention initiatives.

They looked around at several research facilities, according to Mr. Berman, a former Norton Co. executive who now lives in Pennsylvania.

"It was our conclusion that there wasn't any research center superior in quality and accomplishment to what we found at the University of Massachusetts Medical School," he said. "And, we wanted to give something back to Worcester, a place where we spent 20 years and was so important in the formative years of our family."

Mrs. Berman was treated at UMass Memorial Medical Center, and always valued the care and compassion she received there.

The couple decided to donate money to create the Dr. Eileen L. Berman and Stanley I. Berman Foundation Chair in Biomedical Research at the medical school.

Their donation will be placed in an endowment fund, said James Fessenden, spokesman for the medical school. As that money is invested, the yearly investment dividends will be handed to the researcher to support his or her work. In that way, the endowed chairs can last indefinitely, and can be passed down from one researcher to the next.

The medical school has 34 endowed positions, which includes both endowed chairs and endowed professorships; the oldest, the Harry M. Haidak Professorship in Surgery, was established in 1985 and has been used by four medical school professors over the years. Arthur M. Pappas, the former team physician for the Boston Red Sox, established an endowed Chair of Orthopedics in 1999. Craig C. Mello, the medical school researcher who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is the recipient of the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine.

Setting up an endowed chair allows the donor to specify exactly what research they would like their donation to support.

In this case, the endowed chair will be supporting research led by Dale L. Greiner, PhD, who will be working to study human cancerous tumors in mice. The research will include, but not be limited to, the very rare form of cancer that took Mrs. Berman.

Mr. Greiner, who is a professor of molecular medicine at the medical school and co-director of the Diabetes Center for Excellence, has been studying Type 1 diabetes for 30 years. For the last 20, he has been developing a mouse that can be engrafted with human tissues, to study how diabetes develops in humans.

A few years ago, he started working with other diseases — HIV, dengue fever, even ebola — in mice, to help develop new treatments.

And now he has begun grafting cancerous tissue from human tumors into mice. Researchers can study the tumor and watch it develop, allowing them to see if there are markers that develop in the mouse's blood that could be used to detect the disease earlier in humans. Researchers can then conduct drug trials on the mice, to see what shrinks the tumor and what the side effects are.

"All of that cancer work is essentially unfunded," he said. "When you go to funding agencies, when you apply for grants, there are always strings attached. They don't like to pay for high-risk ideas that are not yet proven. We can use this unrestricted money to test these ideas... This kind of freedom is where most innovation and discoveries come from."

A retired businessman, Mr. Berman hopes that one of the side benefits of the endowment is a financial shot in the arm for the city of Worcester.

"If they discover something, people would come there to learn more, to be treated," he said. "There could be an opportunity for growth there."

On MCPHS

One note on last week's column: I referred to the pharmacy school in downtown Worcester, MCPHS University, as a "state" school. Despite the Massachusetts in the school's name, it is a private, nonprofit institution.